Mega journal

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A mega journal (also mega-journal and megajournal) is a peer-reviewed academic open access journal designed to be much larger than a traditional journal by exercising low selectivity among accepted articles. It was pioneered by PLOS ONE . [1] [2] This "very lucrative publishing model" [2] was soon emulated by other publishers.

Contents

Definition

A mega journal has the following defining characteristics:

Other less universal characteristics are

Mega journals are also online-only, with no printed version, and are fully open access, in contrast to hybrid open access journals. [7] Some "predatory" open access publishers use the mega journal model. [1]

Influence

It has been suggested that the academic journal landscape might become dominated by a few mega journals in the future, at least in terms of total number of articles published. [8] Megajournals are also disrupting[ clarification needed ] the market of article processing charges. [9] Their business model may not motivate reviewers, who donate their time to "influence their field, gain exposure to the most current cutting edge research or list their service to a prestigious journal on their CVs." [10] Finally, they may no longer serve as "fora for the exchange ... among colleagues in a particular field or sub-field", as traditionally happened in scholarly journals. [11] To counter that indiscrimination, PLOS ONE , the prototypical megajournal, has started to "package relevant articles into subject-specific collections." [12]

List of mega journals

Notes

  1. ↑ Self-declared: [20]
  2. ↑ Self-declared: [26]
  3. ↑ Self-declared: [27]
  4. ↑ Self-declared: [28]
  5. ↑ Self-declared: [29]
  6. ↑ Self-declared: [30]

Related Research Articles

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<i>PLOS One</i> Peer-reviewed open-access scientific journal

PLOS One is a peer-reviewed open access mega journal published by the Public Library of Science (PLOS) since 2006. The journal covers primary research from any discipline within science and medicine. The Public Library of Science began in 2000 with an online petition initiative by Nobel Prize winner Harold Varmus, formerly director of the National Institutes of Health and at that time director of Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center; Patrick O. Brown, a biochemist at Stanford University; and Michael Eisen, a computational biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nova Science Publishers</span> American academic publishing company

Nova Science Publishers is an academic publisher of books, encyclopedias, handbooks, e-books and journals, based in Hauppauge, New York. It was founded in 1985. Nova is included in Book Citation Index and scopus-indexed. A prolific publisher of books, Nova has received criticism from librarians for not always subjecting its publications to academic peer review and for republishing public domain book chapters and freely-accessible government publications at high prices.

MDPI is a publisher of open-access scientific journals. It publishes over 390 peer-reviewed, open access journals. MDPI is among the largest publishers in the world in terms of journal article output, and is the largest publisher of open access articles.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association</span> Industry association in scholarly publishing

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<i>PeerJ</i> Academic journal

PeerJ is an open access peer-reviewed scientific mega journal covering research in the biological and medical sciences. It was originally published by a company of the same name that was co-founded by CEO Jason Hoyt and publisher Peter Binfield, with initial financial backing of US$950,000 from O'Reilly Media's O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, and later funding from Sage Publishing. In 2024, it was acquired by traditional research publisher Taylor & Francis.

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In scholarly and scientific publishing, altmetrics are non-traditional bibliometrics proposed as an alternative or complement to more traditional citation impact metrics, such as impact factor and h-index. The term altmetrics was proposed in 2010, as a generalization of article level metrics, and has its roots in the #altmetrics hashtag. Although altmetrics are often thought of as metrics about articles, they can be applied to people, journals, books, data sets, presentations, videos, source code repositories, web pages, etc.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Predatory publishing</span> Fraudulent business model for scientific publications

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Beall's List was a prominent list of predatory open-access publishers that was maintained by University of Colorado librarian Jeffrey Beall on his blog Scholarly Open Access. The list aimed to document open-access publishers who did not perform real peer review, effectively publishing any article as long as the authors pay the article processing charge. Originally started as a personal endeavor in 2008, Beall's List became a widely followed piece of work by the mid-2010s. The list was used by scientists to identify exploitative publishers and detect publisher spam.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Who's Afraid of Peer Review?</span> Science article by John Bohannon

"Who's Afraid of Peer Review?" is an article written by Science correspondent John Bohannon that describes his investigation of peer review among fee-charging open-access journals. Between January and August 2013, Bohannon submitted fake scientific papers to 304 journals owned by fee-charging open access publishers. The papers, writes Bohannon, "were designed with such grave and obvious scientific flaws that they should have been rejected immediately by editors and peer reviewers", but 60% of the journals accepted them. The article and associated data were published in the 4 October 2013 issue of Science as open access.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jeffrey Beall</span> American librarian

Jeffrey Beall is an American librarian and library scientist, who drew attention to "predatory open access publishing", a term he coined, and created Beall's list, a list of potentially predatory open-access publishers. He is a critic of the open access publishing movement and particularly how predatory publishers use the open access concept, and is known for his blog Scholarly Open Access. He has also written on this topic in The Charleston Advisor, in Nature, in Learned Publishing, and elsewhere.

The following is a timeline of the international movement for open access to scholarly communication.

Journalology is the scholarly study of all aspects of the academic publishing process. The field seeks to improve the quality of scholarly research by implementing evidence-based practices in academic publishing. The term "journalology" was coined by Stephen Lock, the former editor-in-chief of the BMJ. The first Peer Review Congress, held in 1989 in Chicago, Illinois, is considered a pivotal moment in the founding of journalology as a distinct field. The field of journalology has been influential in pushing for study pre-registration in science, particularly in clinical trials. Clinical trial registration is now expected in most countries. Journalology researchers also work to reform the peer review process.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Beall, Jeffrey (2013). "Five Predatory Mega-Journals: A Review" (PDF). The Charleston Advisor. 14 (4): 20–25. doi:10.5260/chara.14.4.20.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Bo-Christer Björk & David Solomon (March 2014). Developing an Effective Market for Open Access Article Processing Charges (PDF) (Report). Wellcome Trust. pp. 69 pages. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2014-06-02.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 "Wiley". Archived from the original on 2016-03-04. Retrieved 2014-09-26.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 Claire Creaser (5 May 2014). "The rise of the mega-journal". School of Business and Economics Research Blog. Loughborough University.
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 Peter Binfield (19 January 2014). "Novel Scholarly Journal Concepts". In Sönke Bartling; Sascha Friesike (eds.). Opening Science. pp. 155–163. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-00026-8_10. ISBN   978-3-319-00025-1.
  6. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Frank Norman (9 July 2012). "Megajournals". Trading Knowledge. Frank Norman.
  7. 1 2 Björk, Bo-Christer (2015-05-26). "Have the "mega-journals" reached the limits to growth?". PeerJ. 3: e981. doi: 10.7717/peerj.981 . PMC   4451030 . PMID   26038735.
  8. ↑ Hayahiko Ozono, Okayama University, Participants' Report on The 5th SPARC Japan Seminar 2011. "Burgeoning Open Access MegaJournals". National Institute of Informatics.
  9. ↑ Solomon, David J. (2014). "A survey of authors publishing in four megajournals". PeerJ. 2: e365. doi: 10.7717/peerj.365 . PMC   4006221 . PMID   24795855.
  10. ↑ Wellen, R. (2013). "Open Access, Megajournals, and MOOCs: On the Political Economy of Academic Unbundling". SAGE Open. 3 (4): 215824401350727. doi: 10.1177/2158244013507271 .
  11. ↑ Beall, Jeffrey (2013). "The Open-Access Movement is Not Really about Open Access". TripleC. 11 (2): 589–597. doi: 10.31269/triplec.v11i2.525 . S2CID   142604306.
  12. ↑ MacCallum, C. J. (2011). "Why ONE is More Than 5". PLOS Biology. 9 (12): e1001235. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1001235 . PMC   3243728 .
  13. 1 2 Francisco Osorio (5 April 2013). "Open Library of Humanities: mega journals seeing from the south". Facultad de Ciencias Sociales de la Universidad de Chile.
  14. 1 2 "Beyond open access for academic publishers", 15 May 2014, Publishing Technology PLC
  15. 1 2 3 4 Dagmar Sitek & Roland Bertelmann, "Open Access: A State of the Art", 2 March 2014, Springer, doi:10.1007/978-3-319-00026-8_9
  16. ↑ James MacGregor, Kevin Stranack & John Willinsky, "The Public Knowledge Project: Open Source Tools for Open Access to Scholarly Communication", 2 March 2014, doi:10.1007/978-3-319-00026-8_11
  17. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Rhodri Jackson and Martin Richardson, "Gold open access: the future of the academic journal?", Chapter 9 in Cope and Phillip (2014), p.223-248.
  18. ↑ Michael Bernstein & Katie Cottingham, Ph.D. (14 December 2015). "American Chemical Society announces ACS Omega, a new open access journal serving global and multidisciplinary chemistry". www.acs.org. ACS.
  19. 1 2 Peter Binfield, "PLoS ONE and the Rise of the Open Access MegaJournal", The 5th SPARC Japan Seminar 2011, National Institute of Informatics, The 5th SPARC Japan Seminar 2011 February 29, 2012
  20. ↑ "About". Royal Society Open Science.
  21. ↑ Open-Access Mega-Journals: A Bibliometric Profile, November 18, 2016
  22. ↑ Transitioning from a Conventional to a ‘Mega’ Journal: A Bibliometric Case Study of the Journal Medicine, Publications 2017, 5(2), 7; doi:10.3390/publications5020007
  23. ↑ Open-access mega-journals: The future of scholarly communication or academic dumping ground? A review
  24. ↑ Pinfield, Stephen (2016-10-13). "Mega-journals: the future, a stepping stone to it or a leap into the abyss?". Times Higher Education. Archived from the original on May 23, 2023.
  25. ↑ Jeffrey Beall (3 March 2013). "New Term: MOAMJ = Multidisciplinary Open Access Mega Journal". Scholarly Open Access. Archived from the original on 16 July 2014.
  26. ↑ New IEEE Open-Access "Mega Journal" Aims to Boost Technology Innovation "New IEEE Open-Access Mega Journal Aims to Boost Technology Innovation". Archived from the original on 2014-10-06. Retrieved 2014-09-30.
  27. ↑ "Press Release". Open Library of Humanities. Archived from the original on 2014-12-24.
  28. ↑ "De Gruyter Open converts eight subscription journals to Open Access megajournals". De Gruyter Open. September 29, 2014. Archived from the original on 2014-12-24. Retrieved 2014-12-24.
  29. ↑ O'Leary, Mary Beth (4 March 2015). "Introducing Heliyon - Elsevier's new broad scope, open access journal". Elsevier Connect. Archived from the original on Mar 10, 2016.
  30. ↑ "The Journal of Engineering". IET Digital Library. Archived from the original on Oct 2, 2023.

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